Jewish and Democratic?: A Rejoinder to the “Ethnic Democracy” Debate. By Ruth Gavison. Israel Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 1999).The Rise of Secondary States in the Iron Age Levant. By Alexander H. Joffe. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 45, No. 2 (2002).On the antiquity of ethnic states, going back to around 1000 BC. Ancient Israel, the kingdom of David, was one of the first ethnic states.Joffe:“Ethnic
states” are not types or stages in an evolutionary scheme. Rather they are
novel and historically contingent political systems which appear in the Levant
during the first millennium BCE thanks to the confluence of several factors,
not least of all the collapse of imperial domination and the longstanding
city-state system. New forms of local identity and organization developed
during the centuries of relative dislocation, which were later utilized in part
by reemergent elites. The phenomenon has recurred periodically in the
interstices between larger units such as empires, along the margins, and during
periods of collapse. This approach necessarily sees the clustering of certain
behaviors, symbols, and historical evidence as indicative of “ethnic” or
identity organized groups (contra Jones 1997). The extensive use of symbolism
and particular forms of administration make the “ethnic state” archaeologically
detectable.